Recently in Travelogue Category
So we had new year's night in Canberra, then headed out again on the second to stay with D&Y at River Island.
Had a swim in the spa first up which was lovely and cool.
Then down to Tiny's Crossing for a swim in the Wollondilly River. Lovely!
David cooked up a storm for dinner.
As always, the nicest thing about the place is all the wildlife. Didn't get to see the wombat, but Kore saw it the day before - and even patted it!
(sorry this was getting dark and random camera can't zoom that much)
New Year's Eve started relatively early, as we headed out to Kogarah to meet Fiona for brunch (after documenting the statue of Bruce Lee that was put there earlier in the year).
The first cafe we went to refused to give us any service and the menu didn't look inspiring so we left and went to Alexander's. I decided to go for a lighter breakfast since I was going out for lunch. So had waffles which were pretty good.
It was great catching up with Fiona again.
Kore and Stu headed back into town (they wandered around bookstores) and I walked over to Luc and Lizzi's for lunch. It was great catching up with those guys too.
I stopped in at Woollies at the station to pick up some supplies for the evening before training it back into town and a bit of a snooze (don't think I actually slept though).
So our new year's evening was spent having a quiet party at the hotel with some champagne and lots of nibblies (not all consumed though - there was heaps!!).
At 9pm we went onto the hotel pool deck (which was even on our floor) and watched the fireworks over Darling Harbour (shoulda taken the tripod out, oh well).
A bit before midnight (a bit later than I was hoping), we hopped on a train to North Sydney and walked down to Lavendar Bay to watch the fireworks. This would have been a great spot, except we were so late getting there (we arrived at 11:50) that the only place to stand was quite obstructed by trees. But Kore certainly got the idea which was the main thing.
Headed back to Central, and Stu went back to the hotel while Kore and I went off to find me little brother, who had brought a train up from Canberra. Had a drink with D&Y on the train which was great. Left the train around 2:30 when it was scheduled to head back to Canberra.
So all in all a pretty good end to the year :):)
We headed pretty much straight home to Canberra in the morning, dropping Kore off in Mittagong to go to River Island with D&Y for an extra night.
Beer Line Walk
So after pondering over beer bottles and brewing equipment in Haymarket and the pink dots, I went online and found out the little pink dots all over Sydney were part of a street art project called "Beer Line - from Barley to the Bottle". It started in Haymarket with some real barley planted in planter boxes. Unfortunately the barley had been harvested when we were there and it was just grass left. This morning I went to the start of the line and found some more information. It was partly in memory of the Castlemaine Brewery, and went in two directions - right towards Redfern, and left towards Circular Quay. I had intentions of walking the entire line, however I only managed to get as far as Wynyard before I had to get back for Art of the Brick, and then the rest of the week was too busy to finish it.
Beer bottles
Barley planter boxes (harvested, just grass now)
Start of the Beer Line
Space invaders in Haymarket
Footsteps on George Street
Hopscotch outside the QVB
Near Wynyard there was a branch off to the left with basketball lines
Here's some of the other stuff I stopped to take photos of along the walk
The hear/see/speak no evil monkeys had santa hats on
Queen Victoria statue outside the QVB
Dog sculpture outside the QVB
Art of the Brick
This was all kinds of awesome, but I'll put that in a separate entry
Bondi Beach
It seems Sydney Buses forgot that hundreds of people want to go to the beach during the school holidays, and were running a regular weekday timetable (actually there was probably a few extra buses that day otherwise we *never* would have gotten there). So we queued for like half an hour, then had to squeeze onto a bus and stand the whole way. I didn't have my swimmers since I'd been at Art of the Brick and was expecting Stu and Kore to have gone a lot earlier. So I sat under a tree. And got very grumpy at someone who was completely unsympathetic to my not being able to take photos at Harry Potter. So sat there feeling pretty miserable. Blah. Had a snack later with Stu and Kore before heading back to the hotel to recover.
Queue for buses at Bondi Junction
Squeezed onto a bus
Super crowded Bondi Beach
Sydney Aquarium
Too many annoying people, but there was a whole collection of nautical-themed Lego setup which made it pretty awesome. Apparently the company that owns that Aquarium also owns Legoland, so they were doing a promotion. Worked for me :):)
Triton in Lego
Freshwater crayfish
Some sort of dragon
Either a Murray or a Trout Cod
Eastern Water Dragon
Minifig with penguin
Red Indianfish
Cowfish
Little Penguin
Common Sydney Octopus
Jellyfish
Mermaid in Lego
Dory the blue tang
Fish in the dugong tank
Fish in the dugong tank
Fish in the dugong tank
Dugong
Stingray
Cuttlefish
Shark
Turtle
Nautical-themed cupcakes
Shark in the final tank
Sawfish
Fish in the final tank
Kore in the final tank
Kore about to be stabbed by a sawfish
Kore found Nemo (well Marlin actually)
Clownfish
Super awesome Lego display at the end - the white whale made out of Duplo and the biggest Lego mosaic I've ever seen in the background. The baseboards had been spraypainted with the colour to be used, and plates attached on top. But the plates weren't glued down, so there were patches around the edges (and even in the middle) where people had pulled off the plates and stolen them :(
Dinner at Eat Love Pizza
Had a few super yummy pizzas and a couple of drinks and had a nice chat
Crazy pizza stands
Salumi and prosciutto - sopressa, prosciutto crudo, mixed mushrooms, roast garlic and fior de latte. This pizza was awesome!
Kangaroo - potato base with marinated kangaroo, roasted pumpkin, pine nuts, feta and chopped parsley. I also really liked this pizza, and it was Kore's first taste of kangaroo.
Marinara - tiger prawns, mussels, vongole, calamari, chili, mozzarella and parmesan cheese. I didn't actually have any of this one, not a bit fan of seafood pizzas. I'm told it was good though.
Pyrophone Juggernaut
As we left Eat Love Pizza we saw a bunch of people seated watching the Pyrophone Juggernaut. There were people there testing the flames etc for tomorrow night. Unfortunately no show, we would have had to come back the next night :(
Had a crap night sleep last night. Don't know how much longer I can keep this up. Woke up at 5:30am this morning. Got up at 7:00 and did all yesterday's photos for the blog. I may as well have gotten up at 5:30 :/
So we went to Maccas again, and the little brother met us again.
Pink dots are all around Sydney. Possibly part of Street Works
Had a bit of a wander through Darling Harbour, including climbing a rope pyramid.
Billions of bins
Tumbalong Park
Me up the rope tower
Me up the rope tower
The rope tower
View from the rope tower
For Dave2: the Hard Rock Cafe building
Darling Harbour
Brolgas dancing at Cockle Bay Wharf
Darling Harbour
Then to Wildlife World. Spent a couple of hours there with Kore squeeing over kangaroos and koalas.
Fluttery
Kore and a flutterby
Koala
Gak gak bird!
Didn't catch the name of this guy
Zebra finch
Cunningham's skinks
Kookaburra
Yellow-footed rock wallaby
Wombat
Bull ant
Cassowary
A tiny dragon (kid's hand next to it)
Central bearded dragon
Ridge-tailed monitor
Kangaroos
Face-plant kanga
Juvenile emu
Emerald dove
A few seconds later - the dove being chased out of the food by an emu!
Stu, Kore and emus
Salt water crocodile
Yvonne could tell me what these finches are...
Salt water crocodile
Didn't catch the name of this monitor either
Kore and bat
Kore touching a stick insect
Koala
Fiona the curlew upstages the koala keeper talk
Capture!
Rainbow lorikeet
Frilled-neck lizard
Kore and a kangaroo
Salt water crocodile
Was later leaving there than we hoped and had to meet David and Yvonne at a Korean place. Our original instructions were "on Pitt St, south of Town Hall near Capitol Square, on the right". As we were walking I asked what the name of the place was. NaruOne. OK, so into Google Maps. No probs. Except Google Maps was wrong by a whole block. Got the address (375 Pitt St, Lower Ground) and then had to go back a block (after Stu led us downstairs under 395 Pitt St). So anyway. Fifteen minutes late, hot and stressed. *sigh*
Had bibambap at Yvonne's recommendation.
So left there at 2:00 and headed down to the Powerhouse museum for a special exhibition, which might have been awesome, had it not been for stoopid money-hungry corporations. Made me very upset.
So came back to the hotel and crashed, because frankly both Stu and I were completely done with the afternoon.
Although Kore and I did pop out for takeaway - we got some Turkish because she'd never had pide or dolmatas or falafel before.
Watched a heartbreaking documentary on the township of Iitate in Japan that was affected by the Fukushima reactor disaster.
Didn't sleep very well *again* last night :(:( Blah.
Headed out a bit after nine and met the little brother at the local McCafe. Had brekky (bacon and egg mcmuffin and a hash brown.. yumm) then wandered through the Devonshire Street tunnel to the station to buy our tickets. We decided to get a MyMulti (Zone 1).
Art in the Devonshire Street Tunnel
Headed to Town Hall. I went down and got myself a ticket to the Art of the Brick show on Friday morning!
Kore's first ever train!
Left there and went and got our tickets for the Tower/Wildlife World/Aquarium from NRMA (10% discount - same as online). Then to Sydney Tower! I didn't worry about panoramas this time since I did that last time. Just zoomed in on all sorts of things, and did the tour guide thing for Kore. And far out it was crowded! Queued to go up, queued to go down. And then got stuck in the lift. Well not really, it just didn't start. Ended up just hitting the door open button to get out.
Sydney Tower from King Street
Sydney Tower under construction
Don't know what this kid was looking at..
Kore up the tower
Darling Harbour
Pacific Jewel
Highest post box. Except you can't actually buy stamps up the tower. Pointless!
By this time it was lunch time, so we went to the Westfield foodcourt. I had subway! heh. Poor sweetie. Sydney is super crazy busy at the moment, and even at 2pm the food court was packed. Basically the sweetie's idea of hell :(
Then headed across to Hyde Park to see the Archibald Fountain and St Mary's cathedral (didn't bother going in - since "pics or it didn't happen" would mean it didn't happen heh).
Kore and Stu inspecting the wicker concrete on a building in Market Street
Kore in Hyde Park
Archibald Fountain
St Mary's Cathedral
A bit of a wander down Macquarie Street.
Hyde Park Barracks
Stu picks hogwart's nose
Parliament House
State Library
Ibis
I told Kore they look better in flight
Conservatorium of Music
And down to Circular Quay, to go see the Opera House.
Obligatory Harbour Bridge photo
Kore discovers the Opera House is tiled
And back to Circular Quay and the Manly Ferry!
Circular Quay station with barricades up to stop people watching the fireworks there
Circular Quay
This was Kore's first ever ferry
Manly Wharf
Wandered up The Corso to the beach.
Smiley face in sweat
Bubbles!
There are several taps along the Corso for filling up water bottles. Best idea ever!
The Corso
Manly men in Manly
Manly beach
Kore dipped her feet in :)
Then back to the Steyne hotel for a beer. We originally had a table in the middle, but then noticed a window seat was free, so we all moved over there. I tell you what, a nice cold beer, seat by the window with a lovely sea breeze and a view of the ocean was AWESOME!! Really really nice. Even the sweetie felt better after the stressful morning. Decided to get "fish and chips" there because that's a traditional beachy thing to do (and Kore had never had it before, in fact she'd never even been to a pub before!).
Then wandered back to the ferry, which we timed nicely for some lovely sunset pictures over the harbour.
They haven't finished the barricades on this side yet
Kore's second train
And finally back to the hotel.
Had to point out that the moon is upside down here
Bat!
Took over 1100 photos today .. whoops!! Not sure how my experiment to deal with photos on a daily basis is going to work! OK so an hour and a half later and I'm still not finished processing photos, let alone select some to blog, resize, upload and enter them into the blog. Might work on that tomorrow morning if I get a decent nights' sleep and wake up early enough.
So day 2.
Didn't sleep very well :( Three nights in a row... starting to get to me!! :(
Got ready then watched Kore's plane enter the country on Plane Finder - which was SO COOL!! As we were approaching the airport I lost my internet connection, but I looked to the left and there was her plane arriving!! :) Best app ever :)
So we got to the airport and waited a little while for Kore to arrive.
Headed off, and decided to go to Coogee for brunch at Coogee Yeeros. Had a reasonably decent Eggs Benedict.
This is Kore's $20 phone - so cute!
Went for a walk to the beach and up to the headland.
Then wandered back to the car and headed down the coast. Stopped at Maroubra beach to have a quick look.
Then down to La Perouse and Bare Island.
Then down through Brighton..
..and back to my parents' place to pick up all our luggage before heading into town to check into our hotel. Was a bit disappointed with the view from our room (the last time we were here we had an awesome north facing room, but this one has a view of some shrubbery). Oh well.
So settled in for a bit before heading out again for dinner.
Found a little Japanese restaurant (Kura Kura) which was really good and ate and chatted.
Then a bit of a wander through Chinatown and back to the hotel.
1927!!!!
Was aiming to be out the door by 9:30 but it was actually closer to 10am. Went through maccas drive through for brunch and then hit the Federal Highway.
The clouds over Lake George (and Mt Majura) were pretty spectacular.
Traffic was fairly heavy heading out of Sydney, with some fairly long queues on the M5 before and after Campbelltown.
Arrived at my parents' place a bit after 1pm. Had nibbles followed by roast pork and lamb. Nom nom nom!!
After present opening we just chatted and watched slides of our USA 2004 trip and I processed the day's photos and we watched Kore's plane take off from LAX with Plane Finder.
I got a super cool Lego camera -
Pictures aren't super awesome, but it's a fun toy :)
We christened mum and dad's new electric frypan with some zucchini fritters (I had brought up a zucchini that needed eating).
And then before we knew it it was bed time...
So what do you do when work sends you to Melbourne for a week's training? Why, you go down in the morning instead of at night the Sunday before and spend the day wandering around!
21000 steps, and an average of more than one photo per minute in twelve hours later, and I'm exhausted.
Early night for me! :)
Headed down to the coast for the weekend.
It was pretty much a case of the usual - eating junk food, eating pizza, drinking beer (and a sparkling shiraz), going to the shops for the paper, going to Myrtle Beach for a swim, jigsaw, wii, crosswords, kenkens, and of course, going in the spa :):)
Also had a play with the new Eee PC and got some stuff setup on it, including the GPS software so that made me happy.
On the walk to the shops, I took my new "random" camera to have a bit of a play with it. Generally I'm happy with it (especially for macros), however its noise reduction is very aggressive, to the point where it almost looks like one of those "paint" filters in Photoshop where big gloops of colour are the same and picture quality is lost.
(this one looks better at higher res - irfanview is pretty sucky at saving big blobs of red)
On our drive to Myrtle Beach we had to stop and wait for the bridge over the Clyde to open/shut. But we were so far back in the line of cars we didn't get to see it :(
A nice walk through the trees to the beach
We were actually worried that we were going to get rained/stormed on at the beach - this big storm was brewing to the west. However it moved to the north and the beach stayed in the sun.
These are some of the clouds on the way back.
After playing sports resort on the Wii if you just leave it it goes around the various sports locations and shows your Miis hanging out. Weird..
We had three small pizzas - a meat lover's, a ham and pineapple, and a putanesca for the sweetie
The jigsaw I did
A weird but kinda cute concrete chicken that's appeared in the house since last time.
Aftermath of our beers
Of course the suckiest part of going down the coast is having to clean the entire house before you leave. All my dreaded tasks (cleaning toilets, vaccuuming) and no way to escape. Especially when it's so humid. Blah. Jumped in the lukewarm spa at the end to recover.
Also the boys both had colds which means I'm pretty much screwed...
But otherwise, a lovely weekend.
Sorry this entry has *heaps* of pictures... Give up now if you're not interested :)
So Friday afternoon I left work super early and headed off into uncharted territory (Lachlan Valley Way - which I don't think I've ever been on in my life before!) and headed north.
It's a three and a quarter hour drive to Parkes, but amazingly pretty (compared to the Hume Highway to Sydney which is quite boring for a lot of it). Had the road to myself for a lot of it, and the sweetie had given me some podcasts to listen to, so was a great drive.
Well that is until the bugs got so bad I couldn't see out the windscreen anymore..
Ha! That's where the bogans come from!
I arrived at my motel at 6:40pm, and had to wait while they tried to find the room key. Had just barely enough time to dump my stuff and go to the loo before Tony and family picked me up to go to dinner. We went to Bellas in town which had good reviews. And we all agreed, the food was delicious. Although I did eat too much and it meant I took forever to get to sleep!
"Pollo Insalata" - proscuitto line chicken breast served on baby spinach and sweet roasted pumpkin with roasted hazelnut butter and crumbled fetta
Fountain next to my motel, by night
Watched a bit of The Mummy Returns while waiting for dinner to settle.
Saturday morning it was foggy. The motel also had a couple of police teams staying the night, apparently to cover the roads to Bathurst.
We were going to have breakfast at Tony's motel, but they don't do breakfasts on weekends. (?????????) Lame. So went into town and found an open cafe, and I had bacon, eggs and a hash brown. It was bigger than I expected but did keep me going all day.
So off to The Dish!!
It was still foggy, but that made for some cool photos.
We wandered through the visitors' centre and joined the queue for the telescope tours. I think we had to wait maybe three quarters of an hour? The queue length really didn't change the entire day.
They did have astronauts on segways, classic cars arriving, and Einstein to keep the crowds entertained..
The tour was pretty cool.
We got to climb up a temporary staircase on the outside to the outside platform.
Here's a view you can't see every day!!
Then you climb *into* the top of the dish support.
And down into the control room!
There were even some real astronomers doing some real observing. Well so they say, I don't know what sort of results they would have gotten with all the people around with mobile phones and video cameras, and moving the dish around all the time..
And finally out the front door
Next we had a wander down the train tracks past the old Kennedy Antenna (not in use anymore)
A quick look back at The Dish at a different angle
Past the earth-air heat exchanger. This is where they take outside air, then pump it underground for eighty metres to get the air to a constant temperature and into the twelve metre dish they have setup for testing for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).
Twelve metre dish setup for Square Kilometre Array testing
A Lego version of the SKA (not accurate - the real thing will be a lot more "random")
Then headed back up and had a look around at the classic cars.
One of them gave us quite a surprise - it had wallaby joeys in it!!
The dish from another angle
Then it was time for the official ceremony. So they brought the dish down till it almost touched the ground. So low in fact that it nearly took out a bottlebrush tree as they swung it round.
They attached a banner to The Dish and raised it up during the official speeches by Prof Phillip Diamond (head of CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science) (I think) and Dr Megan Clarke (Head of CSIRO).
They also had one of the sopranos for the night's opera lead a chorus of Happy Birthday (Helen Barnett I think)
Then Jess went off to make some Sandtastic art, so I wandered around and took photos as the sun was coming out.
This is Jess' sandtastic art - it's just a sticky bit of card with all these stencils you pull off one at a time and cover with coloured sand. Sand sticks to the card and you shake off the excess. Way cool!
I didn't play cricket on The Dish.. I think maybe I shoulda bought one of these! :)
Another wander while Jess made a paper SKA
Jess and her paper SKA dish
There were a bunch of people there from the Central West Astronomical Society, some of them with telescopes pointed at the sun. Which has some super awesome sunspots going on at the moment!
Then had a look in the receiver room. I never realised that they actually change the receivers all the time! Takes them a few hours to change them over. Dad would have loved all this stuff - he would have understood what the dude was talking about :) These are some of the receivers actually in use at the telescope!
Finally we headed back through the visitors' centre to have a look at the displays.
This is a panel that they made up for the movie The Dish (2000) and donated to CSIRO afterwards.
It's only a model! Shh!
We stopped at a couple of lookout places on the way out.
Then into Parkes to see the War Memorial. It's supposed to be a lookout, but it was all locked up and nothing there to say it ever opened. What's the point of a lookout if you can't go up it? Too many trees around to have any views of the town, so that was a bit fail.
Then headed to Forbes for a late lunch. There were like two places open in the entire town, one of them being Subway, so that's what we had. Then filled the car with petrol and headed home, arriving a bit before 7pm.
So yeah a super fun day away. Pity the sweetie bailed (still feeling too sick). We might have gone to Dubbo for the Sunday, but those plans had to be cancelled. Thanks Tony/Heather/Jess for putting up with me! :)